Books About Books

John Mullan’s book “How Novels Work” (based on his weekly column in the Guardian) is the kind of thing I wish had existed when I was in graduate school for English literature, because when relatives asked what I was doing with my life I could have just given them copy. This simultaneously learned and plainspoken guide dissects every aspect of the novel, from titles to antiheros to how different writers describe weather and phone conversations, and explains heteroglossia in terms that my Aunt Ruth from “over the mountain” would have understood (“literally, ‘many-voicedness’”). My favorite bit is in the “Devices” chapter, when Mullan catalogues the way novelists deploy names:

Even novelists who do not specialize in caricatures or representative types use names with connotations. In Jane Austen novels, it is always likely that characters called, exotically, Olivia or Maria are headed for trouble. In George Eliot, women with names as flowery as Rosamund or Gwendolen are, you sense, going to suffer for their attractions.

Mullan notes that Henry James would keep lists of names in his notebooks, after reading the birth and death announcements in the Times, and quotes a typical entry from 1891:

Names. Beet—Beddington—Leander (surname)—Stormer—Luard—Void (name of a place) or Voyd would do for this.—Morn, or Morne—Facer—Funnel—Haddock—Windermere—Corner—Barringer—Jay—State—Vesey—Dacca—Ulic (Xtian name)—Brimble (or for a house)—Fade—Eily, the Irish name—good for a girl.

Mullan asks whether “a delicate Jamesian fiction” could have borne the weight of a character with a name as silly as “Haddock”; I say, Let’s put nothing past a writer who gave his leading men names like “Lambert” and “Merton.” Though I’d love to live in a house called “Brimble.”—Andrea Walker